I stand staring out the glass sliding door, still in my pajamas but with an extra flannel shirt to war off the chill of winter that has permeated the house overnight. I clutch white-knuckled the still steaming mug of hot chocolate and Jack Daniels. I sip slowly and gaze out at the dead world, the peaceful world, grey and frigid beneath its soft, white cover. It only snowed last night, so the sky is still greasy with thick clouds. Having spent most of my life in Rochester, this is what I'm used to. The season has been too bright so far, and I've spent too much of it squinting, trying desperately to keep the blinding, horrid light out of my eyes. Some call the clouds depressing, dreary. I call them soothing, steadfast guardians against the hideous glow of the too close sun.

Staring at the pristine beauty that will slowly drain you of warmth and life if you stay in it long enough, I can't help but wonder how long it will last before my neighbor and his snow mobile destroy it. It always happens. Every time it snows more than an inch I don't have long to wait until I hear the loud churning of jealous machines as they feast upon elegance, leaving only gasoline soaked entrails in their midst. But that has yet to happen today.

Tiny rivulets of ice run down the face and neck of the small statue of an angel – a young, beautiful woman with dove's wings who is dressed entirely too sparsely for the weather – that stands vigilant over my mother's garden. Frozen tears, perhaps. Maybe she knows something. In my mind I venture to guess that they're the remnants of the last snowfall, which partially melted over the past few days' brief almost-warmth. Snow must have sat atop her head and merely followed the natural contours of her eyes and cheeks as it melted, only to find the stone still too cold and refreezing. It only looks like frozen tears by natural coincidence. Yes, this must be what happened, and I ponder over it no more.

My mind wanders. Words flash by like a radio caught in between two distant stations using the same frequency. Someone is twisting the tuner too quickly. Barely recognizable sounds are glimpsed between static, but it all remains incoherent. Music plays, but there is no melody, just the staccato of songs coming sharply into focus for a briefest instant before fading away just as quickly. It all sounds the same but at different pitches. An Om condensed into the merest moment of time, shouted by a thousand agonized voices from miles away.

Driving, even the car protests disturbing the stillness surrounding it, groaning at every left turn. Some part of it creaks as I pull on the steering wheel, sounding like an ancient whaler returning forsakenly home empty handed after years away, returning less some of the young men that disembarked a world ago upon it and less a part of its captain's leg, perhaps. It creaks like a bow pressed hard against a double bass cello's strings and dragged twistingly down the ill kept catgut. It moans like the old man it is, like the old man I feel like today, wanting only to sit and enjoy the tranquility of a frosty sunrise but forced to move, to act.

I realize at some point I must have turned the radio on, because I notice it now, loud and profane, unholy by contrast to my ruminations. It's off before my thoughts can form, and the world is that much closer to prefection.

"Why do you believe it so impossible that God raises the dead?" My favorite line from a book I long ago denounced and rejected is stuck in my head as I wander down the ice covered asphalt pathways between classes. I step on salt and footprints and tightly packed snow, no destination in mind but walking anyway, to enjoy the day, to enjoy the cold. The Cold. When the wind gusts in just the right direction it stings my cheeks and ears with the beak and talons of some arctic bird of prey, cutting deep into my flesh and freezing even my bones, and as it happens I smile, closing my eyes and breathing deeply, thankful for the proof, the reminder, that I'm alive. Opening my eyes again I find that a lonely, forgotten flyer has hugged itself around my foot for warmth and safety. Mud that remarkably resembles someone's size ten boot mars its skin, once a brilliant shade of yellow, now dull and weary, but its words are still legible. "Campus Crusade for Christ." I chuckle once to myself and return it to the ground for someone else to step on or to read.

Green tea, no milk, no sugar, as I sit down on a garishly colored couch. I watch people as they walk down their private thoughts, bumping occasionally and randomly into the mind of another, gently jostling it from isolation, then stepping back and glancing up to mumble an apology, then looking back down at the ground and continuing on their way. It's interesting to watch how people avoid eye contact, staring absently ahead at their destination but without consideration to the humans around them, or pointedly looking away from and pretending not to notice someone they don't want to talk to. I watch and after a moment I find myself caught staring as a rather attractive girl with red hair and a small scar on her lower lip turns to look at me. For a full second our eyes meet – uninvited, violating, penetrating, not so much a meeting of gazes but a brushing of souls in passing, the way a gust of wind shakes the boughs of an old tree sick with Dutch elm disease on a bright day in July and then disappears. I'm the first to break the stare, jerking my head quickly down to a notebook as if I was merely thinking of the right words when she happened to enter my field of view. For a moment I hope she sees the tiny scrawlings and dozens of thick, black marks where I angrily scribbled out a phrase I didn't like that fill the notebook like maggots in a bloated, rotting corpse. I hope she sees me writing and walks over to start a conversation with me, to ask me what I'm writing or to simply ask my name, but she just turns back and keeps walking.

There are no clouds tonight, so the stars are out and the moon shines down to light the snow with a soft bluish glow. I stand outside and watch my breath rise into the empty air and dissipate long before it reaches an empty heaven. A small glass of gin or vodka or water – I can't tell the difference anymore – is sipped from by numb lips. The angel is still crying and I wonder again why she's doing so. There are easily a dozen things I've done today that are deserving of divine sadness, and it's entirely possible that it wasn't me who made her cry. Deer tracks are pressed into the snow, mercifully untainted by my neighbor and his demonic snowmobiles. I look at the naked trees and the silent, taciturn rocks, and I look for long minutes at angels not yet fallen. I glance back at the beautifully feminine face of yet another woman I'll never understand. She will never tell me what she's weeping for, and so I will simply never know. I breathe once, then turn around and wander inside to sleep.

01/12/2002

Posted on 01/12/2002
Copyright © 2024 Gary Hoffmann